Mercury containing lamps, such as fluorescent lamps, are widely used in schools, factories, office buildings, shopping centers and other large buildings. Such buildings normally have a bulb replacement program as part of their normal maintenance. As will be appreciated, such programs often involve replacing all the lamps in a particular area of the building or, in some circumstances, throughout an entire building or complex.
Both state and federal governments are very concerned over the disposal of spent lamps containing mercury. Current lamp crushing techniques allow the mercury vapor contained in spent lamps to be released into the atmosphere, thus, causing significant environmental damage. When lamps are disposed of in landfills or the like, residual mercury often leaches into the ground.
In view of the above, the United States Environmental Protection Agency has recently enacted legislation preventing spent lamps containing mercury from being disposed of at landfills. Substantial penalties have been enacted to prevent illegal disposal of spent lamps containing mercury such as flourescent lamps. If a landfill is discovered to have mercury containing lamps in their waste, any user of that landfill is considered a potential responsible party (PRP). Under current regulations, any PRP (no matter how large or small) would be liable for the closure of the failed landfill. This responsibility can equate to hundreds of thousands of dollars to a single generator of potentially hazardous material.
As will be appreciated, disposal of spent mercury containing lamps poses a significant problem for those buildings or facilities which tend to be large users of such mercury containing lamps. Heretofore, lamp disposal has been treated as any other waste. That is, it has been necessary for these larger facilities to contract with an organization which would manifest the spent lamps at the location where they are generated, followed by packaging and transporting them to a central processing facility where the spent lamps could be destroyed in a controlled environment. The costs of the paperwork, as well as the processing required to be used to properly dispose of mercury containing lamps in a controlled environment has a significant economic disadvantage associated therewith. As will be appreciated, transporting a large volume of spent lamps to a central processing facility essentially amounts to the transportation of air several hundred miles in most instances.
Because mercury containing lamps come in a wide variety of sizes and shapes, the need and ability to transport the spent lamps to a central processing facility also involves significant handling costs and equipment for insuring against breakage of the lamps during the transportation process. Transportation of spent lamps, sometimes several hundreds of miles, inevitably leads to breakage of some of the lamps along the way and, thus, the release of potentially toxic mercury vapors into the atmosphere. Moreover, some states require a licensed hazardous waste hauler to ship the spent bulbs from the facility whereat the lamps are removed to the central processing facility. Requiring a hazardous waste hauler to move what essentially is air sometimes hundreds of mile can lead to a significant economic problem.
Thus there remains a need and a desire for an apparatus and method for destroying mercury containing lamps which is both efficient and economical and, yet, satisfies environmental concerns when the spent lamps are destroyed by creating a product rather than a waste.